Video: Receiving and reading email

Now, let's talk about how the iPhone and iPod touch check for new email and what you can do with the emails you receive. Depending on the type of email account you have, either your messages show up on your iPhone or iPod as soon as they arrive on your email server, or your device is set to check for new messages at set durations of time. Email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and iCloud are what is known as push email. Instead of waiting for your phone to check if new messages are on the server, the server pushes the new message to your phone, so they show up almost immediately after the person sending the email hits the Send key on his or her computer, barring of course any network traffic that may be clogging things up.

Discover how to get the most out of your iPhone or iPod touch, from making calls, browsing the web, managing your time, and getting around town to taking notes, shooting photos, and listening to music. In this course, author Garrick Chow shows how to perform all of these tasks and more, and introduces the enhancements built into iOS 6, including enhanced language support and commands for Siri, shared photo streams, and the new Reply with Message feature for handling incoming calls. The course also includes hands-on demonstrations on how to accurately type and efficiently use finger gestures, and offers tips for personalizing the setup of the iPhone and iPod touch. An extensive section on troubleshooting helps when the occasional glitch happen.

Receiving and reading email

Now, let's talk about how the iPhone and iPod touch check for new email and what you can do with the emails you receive.Depending on the type of email account you have, either your messages show up on your iPhone or iPod as soon as they arrive on your email server, or your device is set to check for new messages at set durations of time.Email systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and iCloud are what is known as push email.Instead of waiting for your phone to check if new messages are on the server,the server pushes the new message to your phone, so they show up almost immediately after the person sending the email hits the Send key on his or her computer, barring of course any network traffic that may be clogging things up.

Now this does depend on how you have certain options set.Let's look in Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars.And in here, I'll tap Fetch New Data.And here's where you find the on/off switch for Push.If you don't have any email accounts that support Push, turn it off because having Push on does tax your battery more than having Push off.So, even if you do have Push email accounts, you might occasionally want to turn Push off as a battery conservation step.When Push is off or if your email account doesn't support Push, Mail checks for new messages on your server based on the Settings selection under Fetch.

You can choose every 15, 30, or 60 minutes.Notice it says here that checking for new mail less frequently will also conserve battery life.If you select Manually, your iPhone, and iPod touch will not check for new mailuntil you open the Mail application.Additionally, you can tap Advanced to assign different Fetch settings to individual accounts.So, for instance, if you want to make sure your work email gets to you immediately, you can set it to Push.But leave your personal email address set to Fetch even if it supports Push.Okay, so those are the ways Mail checks for new messages.Now, let's take a look at what you can do with the messages you receive. I'll go to Mail.

And again, the act of opening the Mail app makes it connect to your email servers to check if any new messages have arrived.And new to iOS 6, you can also drag the screen down and release it anytime to check for new mail messages manually.So, if you're eagerly awaiting a message from someone, you can sit therepulling down on the screen to make Mail check your inboxes.This works on any specific mailbox screens too and not just on the main Mailbox screen.But here on the main Mailbox page, you see a list of all your inboxes.This lets you quickly scan all your mail accounts and see how many new messages are in each one.

Now you could tap each individual inbox to see the messages in it, but by reading your email that way, you have to keep returning to the main Mail screento access your other email inboxes.A sometimes more convenient alternative is to tap All Inboxes, which lists the contents of all of your account inboxes in chronological order, so you can readall your incoming email regardless of which accounts it was sent to.Let's go back to the main screen for a moment.Under the Inboxes section, is the Accounts section, and it's here where you canaccess your various account folders in full.So, if I tap iCloud, I can access all the folders associated with this account and not just my inbox.

So, if you need to access your other folders, that's how you get to them.Let's go back to the main screen again.Now, let's look at some of the specifics of reading your messages.I'll go into one of my email inboxes, and again, I can browse through my messages by scrolling through.To read a new message in full, just tap it.Mail can be read in both Portrait and Landscape modes.I prefer to read my mail in Portrait most of the time, but also remember thatyou can turn on Orientation Lock if need be by double-clicking the Home buttonto open the Multitasking toolbar, flicking to the right, and then tapping the Orientation Lock button.

This can be convenient if you like to read your email while lying on your side in bed.But if you're sitting or standing up, it's nice to be able to rotate yourdevice to Landscape to make the text bigger.I'll leave the Orientation Lock off for now.While in Mail, you can use the standard finger gestures.Swipe up, and down to scroll, pinch out to zoom in, you can drag around while you're zoomed in, and you can double-tap text to go back to the standard size.You can reply to or forward email by tapping the curved arrow button.Incidentally, if you want to quote a line of text in reply, you can make a selection, and when you tap Reply, notice the selected text is included as a quote.

That's pretty much how it works in regular email programs on your computer.I'll just cancel this for now.If on your computer or through your email host website, you've created folders to store your messages, you can tap the Folder button to move the message you're reading to one of those folders.You can't create folders using your iPhone or iPod touch, so those folders have to be created on your computer beforehand. I'll tap Cancel.You can also delete messages by tapping the Trashcan button.So the message gets sucked down into the trashcan.If you tap Trash accidentally, navigate into your Accounts list of folders that we looked at earlier, and then tap Trash to find your email message.

Then select the message, tap the Folder button, and then you can move your fileback into the Inbox or any other folder of your choice.So, now if I go back to my Inbox, I'll see my message has been moved back here.Now if you want to delete or move a bunch of messages all at once, go back to your Inbox and tap the Edit button.Then tap each message you want to delete or move.Then tap either Delete or Move.I'll just cancel that for now.If the message you receive contains links to any web pages like this one does,you can just tap the link to open the web page.

That opens Safari and takes me to the website.Let's go back to Mail.Similarly, if the email contains an address or a phone number, Mail will recognize them as such, and you'll be able to tap the address to open the Maps app, or tap the phone number to immediately dial it.You can see there's an address here at the bottom of this email.Tapping that opens up the Maps application.If the email contains any photos you'd like to save, just hold your finger down on the image, and after a second, you'll see the buttons to either save the image, which places a copy of the image in your photo library or Copy, which lets you copy the image so you can paste it into another email message, an MMS text message, or some other application.

Now, when you read an email, it gets marked as a read message, and the blue dotnext to it in your email list is removed.Occasionally, you might want to remind yourself to read a message more closely at a later time.Now, you might have created a folder for important messages that you can move it to, but one way I like to remind myself to get back to a message, is to tap this Flag icon, and then choose Mark as Unread.That places the blue dot back next to the message as well as counts the messageamong the number of unread emails on the Mail icon badge, making it very obviousto me that I need to go to my Inbox and read my messages.

As soon as you open the email though, that blue dot will be removed.We also have the option to flag the email with the Flag button.That's just another way you can mark a message to get back to it later.You can see that puts a little Flag icon right next to the subject of the message, which also appears here in the main Inbox.The meaning of the flag is entirely up to you.It could be used to indicate to yourself that you've read the email, but that you need to reply to it soon, or you could use it as a reminder to file it awayin its own folder later on.It's entirely up to you.If you want to unflag the email, just tap it, tap the Flag button again, and tap Unflag.

So, those are some of the options you have available when receiving and reading email.

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